Sō Percussion, Princeton’s Edward T. Cone Performers-in-Residence, invite student musicians to participate in two large works by Julius Eastman: Stay on Itand Gay Guerrilla. These sprawling and electrifying works of 1970s minimalism involve groove, improvisation, and creative decision making.
Tuesday, December 13 – 8pm ET
Sō Percussion Studio in Brooklyn
If you are coming to any of our shows, we are located at 20 Grand Ave. #205 in Brooklyn, across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Concerts are free, and we sell beverages and take donations for the artists.
Momentum
Learn more about Momentum here!
Andrea Mazzariello
Andrea Mazzariello (he/him) is a composer, performer, writer, and teacher. His musical practices include writing songs, making electronic music, and working in notated traditions. His work explores spoken and sung treatments of his own original text, plays with computers and other kinds of electronics, and engages the physiology of performance in novel ways. He writes about listening, musical media, and pedagogy, and teaches and mentors music-makers working in a wide variety of genres and approaches. His music has been performed widely in North America and Europe, and appears on releases by New Amsterdam Records, SEAMUS, Proper Canary, and his own One More Revolution records. The Operating System published his first book, One More Revolution: A Love Song, on Vinyl, in 2018. He teaches composition and music technology at Carleton College, directs the composition program at the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, and mentors and collaborates with young beatmakers, producers, and songwriters at The Key, a youth services organization in downtown Northfield, MN.
Read more about Andrea here!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Featuring
Sō Percussion – Colleen Bernstein – Kasey Blezinger, Shelby Blezinger-McCay (Troika Percussion) – BOROGOSAKAGU (Rogerio Boccato, Kaoru Watanabe, Sameer Gupta) – Victor Caccese (Sandbox Percussion) with James “Banks” Davis – Recap Quartet – Khuentertainment – Beth Meyers
Performing the work of:
Jason Treuting – Julius Eastman – Andy Akiho – Lesley Flanigan – Yvette Jackson ––Susan Marshall – Darian Donovan Thomas
For seven years, Sō Percussion has been running a loft series from their studio in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard neighborhood. In this special marathon evening, percussionists from different parts of Brooklyn’s rich percussion scene converge to showcase all things percussion at Roulette.
Celebrating the release of Jason Treuting’s “Nine Numbers” album on Cantaloupe Music, and culminating in a group rendition of Julius Eastman’s Stay on It, this concert places traditions like Trinidadian steel drums and percussion traditions from Japan, Brazil, and India alongside contemporary percussion chamber music for an eclectic, genre-loaded event.
Beginning at 6:00pm, the concert will be a casual marathon-style event where the audience can come and go throughout.
Roulette Intermedium’s COVID safety protocols. Proof of Vaccination REQUIRED to enter. Masks Required
*** Should this show need to be rescheduled or cancelled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, all tickets sales will be refunded. ***
6-7pm
Sō Percussion | Khuentertainment | Victor Caccesse | Colleen Bernstein
7-8pm
Jason Treuting & Beth Meyers | Borogusakagu (Kauro Watanabe, Sameer Gupta, and Rogerio Boccato) | Recap Quartet
8-9pm
Sō Percussion | Victor Caccesse | Colleen Bernstein | Troika Percussion | Khuentertainment | Borogusakagu (Kauro Watanabe, Sameer Gupta, and Rogerio Boccato) | Recap Quartet
|
Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, an album of songs written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion, is out now on Nonesuch Records, available everywhere here, including on clear vinyl. The musicians, who have known each other since their student days, were presented with three days of gratis studio time and decided to experiment with ideas they had begun putting to tape during the sessions for their January 2021 Nonesuch release Narrow Sea. With Shaw on vocals and Sō—Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting—filling out this new band, they developed songs in the studio, with lyrics inspired by their own wide-ranging interests: James Joyce, the Sacred Harp hymn book, a poem by Anne Carson, the Bible’s Book of Ruth, the American roots tune “I’ll Fly Away,” and the pop perfection of ABBA, among others. The album is co-produced by Shaw, Sō Percussion, and the Grammy Award–winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift).
To coincide with the album’s release, the artists have released a video of them performing their take on ABBA’s “Lay All Your Love on Me,” a track on the new album. The video, directed by Maureen Towey and filmed at Bok in Philadelphia, includes additional vocals from Beth Meyers and Yeji Cha-Beach; you can watch it here:
Shaw, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her vocal composition Partita for 8 Voices, written for and performed with Roomful of Teeth, makes her solo vocal debut with Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part.
The album’s first track, “To the Sky,” is from the Sacred Harp and takes its lyrics from Anne Steele. “I love the songs about death, and going home, and looking toward a time that is better or brighter, which, if there’s one thing to think about in the world, maybe that’s the thing,” Shaw says. “This one I love in particular. There’s a line, ‘Frail solace of an hour/ So soon our transient comforts fly / And pleasure blooms to die.’ It’s meditation on the ephemeral, and I love it.”
“I hadn’t written very many songs, but I have certainly loved many in my life. I’ve been thinking of making a solo album for seven or eight years, but it takes having the right friends and community in the room,” Shaw says. “The prompt for all of us was: What would we make in the room together with no one person in charge, like a band writes in the studio?”
Cha-Beach recalls of the early test run during the Narrow Sea session: “It had that capturing-lightning-in-a bottle feeling.” When the opportunity to have three days in their friends’ studio, Guilford Sound, came up, the five musicians decamped for Vermont with engineer/co-producer Jonathan Low. “Jon is an amazing editor,” Cha-Beach says, “He is so helpful in thinking about: ‘We have these ideas: how do we shrink those and make them come across on an album?’”
One such idea was for Shaw to do a duet with each member of Sō. She sings with Josh Quillen on steel drums on the title track, which she wrote in under an hour in a “free-writing zone, very inspired by James Joyce, taking on that brain space,” she says. Lyrically, the song is “related to some math bits that I love, but also memory, and love songs of somebody who’s gone or passed away, or that you’re no longer with: what is the sound of that kind of devastation or confusion or love?” They recorded the song only twice, and the first take is on the album. “It’s very spare. The playing is very Josh; it’s so sensitive,” Shaw says.
Adam Sliwinski’s marimba duet with Shaw is an interpretation of the ABBA song “Lay All Your Love on Me.” She explains, “It’s really a Bach chorale. Also, the idea of someone singing ‘Don’t go wasting your emotion / Lay all your love on me / Don’t go sharing your devotion / Lay all your love on me,’ over and over again very slowly, there’s a certain tragedy in it. And then Adam did some absolutely exquisite layering that built this stunning world from the marimba.”
Jason Treuting on the drum kit joined Shaw for “Long Ago We Counted.” She suggested, “Why don’t we start with the voice and the kit having a weird conversation, sort of like two babies talking to each other? And then we built this loop, and we go from this place that’s totally uncomfortable and nonsensical to something that’s rich and rolling and satisfying.” For “Some Bright Morning,” the duet with Cha-Beach—who here plays electronics, piano, and Hammond organ—Shaw drew upon a twelfth century liturgical hymn she had sung regularly in church during her college years: “Salve Regina.”
“Some songs on Let the Soil… were very specifically composed by Caroline,” Cha-Beach says. “But others were this assemblage of ideas: finding words, an idea for how a melody could work, a harmony, and then tossing it in a blender and trusting each other.” Shaw adds, “What I love about Sō is the curiosity about how objects make sounds and how they speak to each other. [There was an] underlying thread of thinking about what goes into soil, how we take care of it, how we allow it to be itself, how we contain it, and what can come out of it if you cultivate the right environment, which for me is always this wonderful metaphor for creativity and collaboration: let people be themselves and see what happens,” she concludes.
